Analysis: F1 Overtaking Statistics & Analysis

I've just come across one of the best analysis of overtaking that I think I've ever seen. Click here and here for a full analysis. I'll put the key bits in this thread - full credit though goes to the original authors.

Decreases in Overtaking- 1993 >> 1994: A lot of changes after Imola to make F1 safer- 1995 >> 1996: 107% Rule, field size down from 26 to 22- 2000 >> 2001: Traction Control Introduced- 2003 to 2005: Engines must last longer

Some of the rule changes, in terms of overtaking have not worked. Do we need Single Lap Qualifying back so overtaking can (hopefully) return? Obviously it's not a feasable idea to reverse the rules back to 15/20 years ago as F1 back then I think we agree was not safe. But some heads at least need to be put together, because the new designs of the cars have done nothing to increase overtaking, and I fear it could be worse next year.

In a nutshell, I think F1 needs to really shoot for about double the overtaking there is now. This means taking big swings at the problem, not small changes like this year's aero changes and very restricted KERS rules.

I'm all for banning wings and winglets, going for a streamlined body and all downforce from a standardized ground effects package.

Why does the increase for 2006 have to be attributed to the engines? Why not the return to tyres only expected to last 100km/h? Just look at the massive drop from 2004-2005, and then the rebound for 2006 and IMO its almost nothing to do with the engines.

Good stats. The more recent reduction from mid 90s is quite obviously influenced most by a reduction in the size of the field. With field size taken into account it would be closer.

That said I truly believe that qualifying with race fuel has made racing worse as the cars start in race-pace order. Under open qualifying drivers often got upfront with a good hotlap setup even when they didnt have good race pace (remember Webber putting the jag on the front row back in 02-03?_ We need to get back to open qual asap to improve racing. Revealing weights has made it even worse this year as people know when the other guy will stop and not risk a move.

Very interesting. Don't you have data from earlier periods?
Are overtakings rated only when fought on track, or just changed positions? Because in old days a driver usually changed place quite a lot just because of dnf's.

The graph like other is a tremendous work, but not so useful, It compares years and technical regulations changes that sometimes overlapped and neglecs the representation of the field.

For example, those graphs counts all overtakings including lapped cars, it is evident that in 83 where cars sometime finished 6 laps down the winner and had massive lap time difference were easily overtaken, which is impossible now.

The infamous 94 year is another example, Everybody put the fault on pit stops but fail to take into account all the previous changes that sometimes made 2 or 3 years to be implemented correctly.

To have a good comparision you would need to have the same circumstances and have all changes accounted, sampled one by one to finally see where the problem lies.

Why does the increase for 2006 have to be attributed to the engines? Why not the return to tyres only expected to last 100km/h? Just look at the massive drop from 2004-2005, and then the rebound for 2006 and IMO its almost nothing to do with the engines.

Rain. There was no wet race in 2005, but there were some in 2004 as well as in 2006.

In a nutshell, I think F1 needs to really shoot for about double the overtaking there is now. This means taking big swings at the problem, not small changes like this year's aero changes and very restricted KERS rules.

I'm all for banning wings and winglets, going for a streamlined body and all downforce from a standardized ground effects package.

you only ever need 3 rules on engines.Max power.Max cost.Max number per season.The rest is BS as far as engines are concerned.

""If you want to have overtaking you need to have drivers that are not fit and that make mistakes," he added. "Drivers that are not fit doesn't exist any more, that was 20 years ago, and drivers that make mistakes are very difficult now because you have all the electronics now. So as long as you have all that, you will never have a huge amount of overtaking.

"But there has never been a huge amount of overtaking in F1, even 30 years ago, so what are you trying to get? When people say the racing used to be better it is only because you remember the one or two good races that we had 10 years ago. But when you look at it over the years there has never really been a lot of overtaking anyway."

To have passing you have to have:

Speed differential of at LEAST 1.0 to 1.5 seconds per lap (OWG). Look at the field in 09. That gap is just not there. Kimi vs Nakajima today. Drivers are not making mistakes and with equalized, rev limited engines and more and more spec aero passing is just not possible.

Tracks. Spain, Monaco, Valencia, Hungary, Singapore....

Aero dependent cars with equalized horsepower and decreasing amounts of design freedom are not going to increase passing. My fear is that next year will see another variable removed and passing will become more difficult. In no way am I ever going to subscribe to the notion that divers are going to be "forced" to pass next year vs the passing that often takes place in the pits currently. If they could they would. The current point system PENALIZES banzai moves anyway.

As the fuel load decreases the handling of the car will change. True, but is it going to change enough? Again, look at Kimi and Nakajima today. I really hope I am wrong but I think this move is not one that is going to improve racing.

you only ever need 3 rules on engines.Max power.Max cost.Max number per season.The rest is BS as far as engines are concerned.

As for overtaking reduce braking efficiency.

- Remove Parc Ferme rules - with fixed number of sealed and stamped engines it is not needed, only makes things more complicated. With its removal let the teams be able to vary setups between qualification and race to larger extents- Remove rev limit - again with fixed number of engines teams won't abuse them but will be able to use short periods at higher revs at their discretion. If they blow their engines, that's their problem.- Remove stupid gearbox rules. - Low fuel qualification.

The watershed was 1993/1994: The introduction of the artificial fuel stops.

1993 and earlier the figure for 'average overtakes per driver and Grand Prix' was between 1.60 and 0.94; 1994 and later the same figure was between 0.95 and 0.53.

It has nothing to do with refuelling. I hate to bring up the points DOF_power used to make, but part of the overtaking situation was helped by technological aids. They help stabilise the F1 cars in dirty air. The drop in overtaking between 2007 and 2008 (despite the fact that 2008 had quite a few more wet races) could possibly be attributed to the banning of traction control. Besides, there was refuelling in 1983 and as you can see, the overtaking wasn't too bad.

Engines of course are a big factor as well. Slipstreaming is an absolute necessity for overtaking.

Nick Heidfeld said the same thinga year ago in an interview when asked why they are less overtaking maneuvres. The brakes are just incredibly good and the braking distance is extremely short. The second reason he mentioned was the cars beeing so aero-grip dependent.

The graph like other is a tremendous work, but not so useful, It compares years and technical regulations changes that sometimes overlapped and neglecs the representation of the field.

For example, those graphs counts all overtakings including lapped cars, it is evident that in 83 where cars sometime finished 6 laps down the winner and had massive lap time difference were easily overtaken, which is impossible now.

The infamous 94 year is another example, Everybody put the fault on pit stops but fail to take into account all the previous changes that sometimes made 2 or 3 years to be implemented correctly.

To have a good comparision you would need to have the same circumstances and have all changes accounted, sampled one by one to finally see where the problem lies.

Important point, if they include lapping cars as overtakes then it changes everything.

Exotic technology in brakes is what's killing overtaking. The stopping distances are just too short giving no window of opportunity to really take advantage of mistakes.

It's no co-incidence that most overtaking moves are made on the first lap when brakes aren't operating at optimal temperatures.

Now alguersari just made a mistake in a street track where braking distance are short, yet no problem...why?

Because first shorter braking distance allow for more slipstream time (replace slipstream by closing in time if we speak about moderate straights) next because if the guy makes a mistake the mistake has actually a greater effect than with a longer braking distance.See for example if the guy breaks @ 50m/s let's say 1 tenths of a second earlier than you in:

A: a braking distance of 100 meters to get to 25m/sB: a braking distance of 50 meters to get to 25m/s

In A average the guy will have to lose 0,25m/s each meter meaning if he breaks 0,1s ealier than you, you'll have a 0,025m/s speed differential; In B the guy loses 0,5m/s and thus the speed differential will be 0,05m/s. which actually means you'll travel two time the distance and you'll then be two time ahead of him.

Actually to be fair, you have to reverse the problem, if you want to break later than him you'll have more opportunities of overshooting your turn, but that's compensated by the fact you can go alongside him since you have more time to slipstream and you can then prepare for slightly delayed braking versus your usual braking point.

All of this meaning that actually since 2007 quite significant part of overtaking moves were done on braking and considering the aerodynamics that prevent a bit from getting real close, more slipstream time is not too much.

The only problem is for very short distances, those within the two car lengths.

P.S: Yes of course, the decelerating rates are linear while in real life they're not...but i don't have anydata of braking curves for each corner for F1 cars and i doubt anyone has it here.

Remove Shanghai (57 overtakes) and Malaysia and we`ll end up with something like 4-5 overtakings per race this year.

Jacques Villeneuve Autosport 06.

""If you want to have overtaking you need to have drivers that are not fit and that make mistakes," he added. "Drivers that are not fit doesn't exist any more, that was 20 years ago, and drivers that make mistakes are very difficult now because you have all the electronics now. So as long as you have all that, you will never have a huge amount of overtaking.

"But there has never been a huge amount of overtaking in F1, even 30 years ago, so what are you trying to get? When people say the racing used to be better it is only because you remember the one or two good races that we had 10 years ago. But when you look at it over the years there has never really been a lot of overtaking anyway."

To have passing you have to have:

Speed differential of at LEAST 1.0 to 1.5 seconds per lap (OWG). Look at the field in 09. That gap is just not there. Kimi vs Nakajima today. Drivers are not making mistakes and with equalized, rev limited engines and more and more spec aero passing is just not possible.

Tracks. Spain, Monaco, Valencia, Hungary, Singapore....

Aero dependent cars with equalized horsepower and decreasing amounts of design freedom are not going to increase passing. My fear is that next year will see another variable removed and passing will become more difficult. In no way am I ever going to subscribe to the notion that divers are going to be "forced" to pass next year vs the passing that often takes place in the pits currently. If they could they would. The current point system PENALIZES banzai moves anyway.

As the fuel load decreases the handling of the car will change. True, but is it going to change enough? Again, look at Kimi and Nakajima today. I really hope I am wrong but I think this move is not one that is going to improve racing.

Edit for spelling. Thanks giacomo

What about GP2?

2005-2007 there was tonnes of overtaking, in same spec cars.

Then from 2008, it dried up dramatically when they switched to F1 style car.

Notes:- Wet races removed.- Only up until Round 13 this year.- Singapore 2008 not included.- Indianapolis 2005 not included - only 6 cars in it.- Fuji 2008 not included - only one dry race, thus not representative.- Sepang 2009 not included - only half race, thus not representative.

In blue are those races lucky to still be on the calendar, in red are those off the provisional calendar for 2010 (in black BTW for Hockenheim/Nurburgring - unsure about those 2).

Speed differential of at LEAST 1.0 to 1.5 seconds per lap (OWG). Look at the field in 09. That gap is just not there. Kimi vs Nakajima today. Drivers are not making mistakes and with equalized, rev limited engines and more and more spec aero passing is just not possible.

Wrong. There were instances where a trailing car was 3s faster than the car ahead when in clean air. Then impossible to pass.

Like Rosberg when he went to the rear after his mistakes. He was going nowhere and he was 3s/lap faster than the back markers.

Wrong. There were instances where a trailing car was 3s faster than the car ahead when in clean air. Then impossible to pass.

Like Rosberg when he went to the rear after his mistakes. He was going nowhere and he was 3s/lap faster than the back markers.

No, you can't think like that. People take the differential of lap time in clean air and then apply it to a different time and different conditions.

Rosberg did certainly not closed in a 3sec/lap the reason being that having such a differential of speed would mean running into the guy in front of you, you then need to slow down which means= less downforce and which means in many instances this year a 0,5s/lap difference.

So as far as OWG is concerned, the goal is pretty much fulfilled. Now if you take in general, re read my previous sentance, and imagine a car, in the street of singapore closing in from several hundreds of meters till 0 from the leading car at 3s/lap...that's impossibe.

Imagine you on the road, i'm sure you've been stuck like that, you have 30km/h differential with the one you're closing in, if you have a a clear straigth, you overtake, if not because you don't have the place to pass, you're forced to slow down.

Wow, Valencia is even worse than I remembered. It's now officially the worst track in F1 history. People often underestimate the importance of tracks when thinking about how to improve overtaking. Nothing short of changing the cars to bikes will help, if you have tracks like Valencia, Singapore and Hungary on the calendar. To my recollection, the OWG never paid any attention to this detail. The contracts with the tracks should include a clause that mandates changes to the track if the number of overtakings is less than half compared to the average. Massive changes are needed in Valencia, the track is a complete failure.

A lot of people here are taking wrong conclusions from those stats. Where's what I think:

- The introduction of refuelling in 1994 might not have helped passing, but it can't possibly be the main reason for the problem. There was a dramatic constant downhill trend since the beginning of the analysed data until 1996. Ever since it's stayed relatively constant. 1994 was one of the biggest drops, but only a part of the trend which was always downhill. The big issue wasn't a suddenly introduced rule change, but rather something subtler. That would be the constant improvements in aerodynamics (the BIG BIG issue), and then the constant improvements in the professionalism of the teams and drivers involved.

- I'm absolutely sure that lapped cars isn't a part of the numbers. Look at the tables. Monaco 2003 shows up there as the race without a single pass. Yet at least 5 cars were lapped there. The decrease in passes is VERY real and not just a product of rose tinted glasses or flawed statistics. However, and rather surprisingly to me, things have remained pretty much the same since 1996, give or take small variances from year to year. You know what this means? The winglets, the narrow cars, the grooved tyres were never as much of a problem as we thought.

- I don't believe the prohibition of electronic driving aids makes any difference in terms of passing. They became increasingly popular in the period of 1989-1993 and the passes were going down big big time. To be fair, it kept going down big time even after they were banned. Can't see any relevant difference in the 2007 to 2008 numbers neither (when TC was banned again).

- The aero changes for this year was a failure, if anything the numbers have gone slightly downhill. I believe Ogami Musashi disagrees with me here, but I also believe the reason of the misunderstanding is mostly semantics. Yeah I know cars can follow each other closely now, and apparently that was the only thing the OWG wanted to do or something. But hey, a f***ing fortune was invested in these changes. I can't see how it's any justified to spend that much for the actual number of passes to remain the same, or even slightly worse as it seems. It's all went spectacularly wrong.

- On brakes I tend to side with Ogami Musashi here. I don't think that is the issue at all, if anything most of the passes we see are crazy last minute bonzai braking moves. What we actually need is many more slipstreaming passes. And here again the problem is subtle, because the cars can actually slipstream each others beautifully well (until they hit the rev limiter), we've seen this occasionally. The problem is in getting close enough after a corner to begin the slipstream! But these points here are just my opinion based on watching the races rather than looking at the stats.

- I also think the current tracks aren't the problem, AT ALL. Ffs just look at the Detroit and Phoenix numbers. How were those mickey mouse tracks any better for passing than Singapore? Yet the numbers are much much better because they raced there in the mid 80s, and not with these super aero sensitive bitches.

- I'm all up for a big badass F1 version of the 2005/2006/2007 GP2 car. That little beast was f***ing awesome to watch.

The OP list fails to note that most passing occurs during pitstops now (probably mentioned already) but also fails to mention how many near on track passes there used to be, as in cars getting side by side but the passee saving it and staying ahead - those were just as exciting as the actual recorded on paper passes and there was more of them than actual successful passes.

I would like to see the two rubber rule removed. Let teams choose their rubber in advance of the race. If a car can start off at a steady pace to protect its tyres and get through a race one set tyres then so much the better.